Chinese tourist site entry tickets: intersemiotic complementarity in an ecosocial process

Abstract

This article explores how tourist site entry tickets multimodally construe a coherent message and how they are integrated into a grander ecosocial process. Primarily using Royce's intersemiotic complementarity framework we focus on the ideational meanings of an entry ticket to a famous site called the Juyong Pass along the Great Wall of China. Our analysis reveals two types of cohesion: the internal and the extended. As for internal cohesion, intersemiotic complementarity is semantically established through a series of cohesive ties between features of the verbal and the visual modes on the front and the back of the ticket. The extended cohesion is construed through an integration of the multimodal text with the material–physical and other semiotic–discursive practices of its ecosocial environment. During the analysis and discussion, reference is made to another entry ticket to the same site as well as to a database of about 300 entry tickets from tourist sites in China. This article makes an important contribution to an understanding of intersemiotic complementarity in front–back multimodal/multilingual texts and to the relation between this type of complementarity and the concept of ecosocial process.

Keywords:

• tourist site entry ticket
• intersemiotic complementarity
• ecosocial process
• China
• tourism

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to the Office of the Ming Tombs Special Administrative District, Changping District, Beijing, for granting us the permission to use the images of the Juyongguan Great Wall 2001 entry ticket with the price of 40 RMB Yuan and the 2011 entry ticket with the price of 40 RMB Yuan for this paper.

Notes

1. The Juyong Pass sees approximately 1.1–1.2 million visitors per year. Among them, non-Chinese tourists comprise about 9% (Office of the Ming Tombs Special Administrative District, pers. comm.).

2. We are grateful to Ruqaiya Hasan for her suggestion of the terms “intelligible” and “sensible”.

3. We assume here that non-Chinese tourists are those who have no knowledge of the Chinese linguistic system.

4. Unfortunately, it is not within the scope of this article to make an adequate comparison of the ecosocial environment of tourist artefacts and Jaworski and Thurlow's work on tourist spaces and associated discursive and embodied practices.